Archive News from Digital Main Street

For Hilda Siegel, powerlifting was the antidote to a difficult period in her life...

For 80 years, family-run British Empire Fuels has reliably kept the residents and cottagers of Kawartha Lakes and Trent Lakes warm in the winter and cool in the summer. They’ve established themselves as a go-to for HVAC installation and repair,  as well as propane and fuel oil delivery. “People need you, no matter what the economy does…,” says Tim Groen, the General Manager of British Empire Fuels.  they still want to be warm and they still want to be cool.” 

In the middle of the pandemic, Amit Sharma relocated his consultancy Sharma Immigration from Brampton to Welland. “I got my license in 2019 and, by December, I was working on my website branding and all that stuff,” he says. “In March 2020, I was about to finalize the office, but then the pandemic came.”

Mark Iczko’s curtain business The Drapery King has always thrived on getting people into his North York showroom. In person he can be his regular charming self, easily answering questions on the spot and building a quick rapport with anyone who walks through the door. But every once in a while, a sale through the website rewires his thinking surrounding the importance of digital presence.

For a time, Daniel Sáez’s Noctua bakery embraced ephemerality, living in the inbetween of pop-ups, Shopify sales and social media buzz, his photogenic bread and pastries selling out weekly for months on end. It worked and felt like the logical next step in a career that included managing kitchens and baking for Sud Forno, Terroni, and the Beet.

The day after COVID-19 hit Canada, Barbara Gill knew the pandemic was going to have an irrevocable impact on The Glen Fitness Studio, the fitness centre she’d opened in Glen Williams just outside Georgetown in 2013.

In North Bay, C & R Safety Training Solutions is one of only a handful of businesses offering safety training. It’s a resource-rich area and home to a widespread of industries requiring certification for Ministry of Labour health and safety training, Red Cross and Technical Standards and Safety Authority courses. To put it in perspective: C & R Safety Training Solutions offers 40 courses and certifications.

On weekdays Butter Dream Cakes owner Meganne Belisle tirelessly bakes a near-unending lineup of custom cake orders and cupcake batches out of the kitchen in her Picton shop. The storefront is closed so it’s mostly a time of solitude devoted to sweet concoctions of mathematically precise baking magic punctuated with a little podcast bingeing while she’s at it.

People who visit The Green Gecko boutique in the quaint village of Lyndhurst often leave with stories. Sometimes those stories come in the form of unique decor Terri Dawson and her husband Peter have found during their travels throughout South East Asia or handmade goods they’ve sourced from local artisans. Sometimes it’s just an exchange about the stunning Victorian home they’ve converted into a small gift shop.

When Denny Vervaet, founder of Red Barn Brewing Co., lost his grandfather in 2001, he kept a small stubby beer bottle as a reminder. It was a token for all the bottles of his grandfather’s brewing experiments that Vervaet capped as a kid and the stories his grandfather, who was born in Belgium, told him like the one about the cat that fell in a batch of the beer.